To me, what is important about a lot of the mathematics I teach/taught (moving to CS) is the logic and reasoning, paired with problem solving. I don’t know what that looks like on every level as far as courses go but it seems to have a home in mathematics for the time being.

Also, anyone who has observed me is giving more pedagogical feedback than content. It seems to be understood that teachers should develop professional communities within our school and elsewhere for content-based feedback. Surely we can’t expect Admins to be fluent in all subject matter! (Easy to say for big content areas, but what about your outlier classes like Career Tech, foreign languages.

Side note: I was math major in college and masters in secondary math ed. I was required to take 2 courses of foreign language as part of math undergrad (not to mention 4 English and 2 history courses). Perhaps universities and community colleges are going for a better “student” who helps represent the school well and at least has a foundational “understanding” (exposure really though) of all content areas.

I think this is almost a specifically US issue with its ideals that a university education provides a broad base combined with the fact that there is, to a large extent, no national curriculum, so we cannot necessarily count on students having already engaged with a variety of disciplines at a high level.

In the Netherlands, it is assumed that high school has provided a broad base and that university is where students specialize. Therefore, if you wanted to major in communications or European studies, there is no need for you to take a math or science course; you have completed that in high school and now will focus on your specific field. All the courses that you take will be of special interest to your field.

There are benefits and drawbacks to this approach. An obvious benefit is that no one who is not majoring in a technical field ever has to factorize a polynomial again after high school. A drawback is that you have to decide at a relatively young age what you want to specialize in, without the benefit of dabbling in lots of different courses or beginning as an “undeclared” major. (That being said, the cost of university is much lower here, so it is not uncommon for students to drop their major and reenroll with a different major.)

Other than tradition, I’ve always wondered what’s the big deal about Algebra 2 content? I’m currently working through two courses on Brilliant.org, both of which have parts that are kicking my Algebra 2 Proficient butt: “Outside the Box Geometry” and “Algebra Through Puzzles.” Neither require Algebra 2 knowledge and, in fact, both require little more algorithmic knowledge than what’s taught in an 8th grade algebra or a basic geometry course. So either we, as a society, really value the content of Algebra 2 (which I highly doubt), or we deem it a measure of one’s smartness. If our goal is something more powerful, such as that high school graduates should be able to reason and solve complex problems, then this opens up far more options of what the content could be of graduation required math courses.